Terminal Boredom Quotes

Men are an offshoot of humanity as well, but they’re a deviant strain. They’re freaks.

She could just imagine, all her friends and family mourning around her grave. The tombstone would read Kari Wagner, Died of Sheer Stupidity. It would be almost as bad to have her grave marker read Died of Terminal Bedroom Boredom.

I’m an introvert and introverts need companions.

He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest.

A terminal illness forces us to make every second count, whereas the forces of boredom make us count every second.

Life might merely be a momentary bolt of lightning in the dark, after which the self melts into the infinite darkness.

Why do you think there are no gods on Mount Olympus now? They killed themselves, that’s why. They were terminally bored.

Don't worry. The world won't stop spinning. It'll keep going, even if you don't want it to. On and on, until you're absolutely sick of it.

The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.

Even in this day and age, we still revere truth. But at the same time, we devote ourselves to the task of erasing the distinction between truth and fiction.

I no longer care about happiness or unhappiness. I just hope the scenery's pretty, wherever I am.

I had always assumed HE was doing an impression of a moron, but sometimes I wonder if HE isn’t simply stupid.

Like most people these days, I don’t overthink things. I’ll go along with whatever. No firm beliefs, no hang-ups. Just a lack of self-confidence tangled up in fatalistic resignation. Whatever the situation, nothing ever reaches me on an emotional level. Nothing’s important. Because I won’t let it be. I operate on mood alone. No regrets, no looking back. Before me, the world stretches out flat, smooth and featureless. Gentle and inconstant.

There was no way anyone could live in a world like this with a fully functioning mind. You only found yourself feeling angry from morning until night. If she ended up joining some kind of political movement as a result, her mother and father would be upset. Using drugs, she told herself, was her way of being a good daughter.

And having four kids? Giving birth to them naturally? What is she, an animal?

Whenever she got that way, I couldn’t help but feel like I was just some human-shaped receptacle, there to receive her emotional excreta.

Though men were adults they were children, seemingly complex but as simple as could be; they were utterly unmanageable creatures.

Syzygy? Androgyny? I'm no man and I'm no woman. Who needs gender anyway? I just want to get out of this place, to be on my own.

My favourite thing is to be by myself. I can’t take drugs, I don’t smoke and I can barely drink, but I still know how to pass the time.

I’m a sucker for trends. I don’t have much in the way of agency. I always want to try whatever’s popular.

Time passes, the planet has its many histories, and things decline. That’s all there is to it.

Unfettered spaces scare me. I’m not used to scenes that aren’t in a frame. Looking at a picture inside a border always calms me down, whether it’s an ultravista or the real thing. It’s probably from all the TV.

What inspired Edwin to speak just then? He found himself dwelling on the matter years later, at war, in the terminal horror and boredom of the trenches. Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.

Even when she clung to him like this, she felt that the largest part of him was off wandering through some unknown territory all alone. Even in her arms, he was always able to liberate himself from her, to make himself free. She envied him that. Sol was an alien.

I alone (well, probably not) know the great secret of this existence, and I’ll have to live out the rest of my life keeping it at all costs. Right now, I have no intention of sacrificing my life for some underground resistance movement. But who knows, it might come to that someday. Shuddering, I turned back to my diary. Someday, surely someday … something will happen. Still shuddering, I finished the entry.

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife. But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator.

The first step in retracing our way to health is to abandon our attachment to what is called positive thinking. Too many times in the course of palliative care work I sat with dejected people who expressed their bewilderment at having developed cancer. “I have always been a positive thinker,” one man in his late forties told me. “I have never given in to pessimistic thoughts. Why should I get cancer?” As an antidote to terminal optimism, I have recommended the power of negative thinking. “Tongue in cheek, of course,” I quickly add. “What I really believe in is the power of thinking.” As soon as we qualify the word thinking with the adjective positive, we exclude those parts of reality that strike us as “negative.” That is how most people who espouse positive thinking seem to operate. Genuine positive thinking begins by including all our reality. It is guided by the confidence that we can trust ourselves to face the full truth, whatever that full truth may turn out to be. As Dr. Michael Kerr points out, compulsive optimism is one of the ways we bind our anxiety to avoid confronting it. That form of positive thinking is the coping mechanism of the hurt child. The adult who remains hurt without being aware of it makes this residual defence of the child into a life principle. The onset of symptoms or the diagnosis of a disease should prompt a two-pronged inquiry: what is this illness saying about the past and present, and what will help in the future? Many approaches focus only on the second half of that healing dyad without considering fully what led to the manifestation of illness in the first place. Such “positive” methods fill the bookshelves and the airwaves. In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively. Negative thinking is not a doleful, pessimistic view that masquerades as “realism.” Rather, it is a willingness to consider what is not working. What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden. Even more fundamentally, not posing those questions is itself a source of stress. First, “positive thinking” is based on an unconscious belief that we are not strong enough to handle reality. Allowing this fear to dominate engenders a state of childhood apprehension. Whether or not the apprehension is conscious, it is a state of stress. Second, lack of essential information about ourselves and our situation is one of the major sources of stress and one of the potent activators of the hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress response. Third, stress wanes as independent, autonomous control increases. One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or by the fear of boredom. The reason is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything. Like a leaf blown by the wind, the driven person is controlled by forces more powerful than he is. His autonomous will is not engaged, even if he believes that he has “chosen” his stressed lifestyle and even if he enjoys his activities. The choices he makes are attached to invisible strings. He is still unable to say no, even if it is only to his own drivenness. When he finally wakes up, he shakes his head, Pinocchio-like, and says, “How foolish I was when I was a puppet.

Rincewind sighed. He liked lettuce. It was so incredibly boring. He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest.

While I fielded her questions, I had to ask myself: What was it about her that was turning me into a man? Got to be all that femininity. She’s acting like such a woman (as society defines the role, anyway) that I have to play the man just to keep the balance. What if I ran into a boy? Could I even play the part of a woman?

When we first met, Reiko still had something of a wrecked beauty. Now, not even those ruins remained.

I answered without thinking. For me, a conversation’s just a series of reactions, reflex responses. I’ve got a habit of saying whatever the other person wants to hear. I’m a real people-pleaser. I know it’s probably not a good thing, but I accept myself – devil-may-care attitude and all.

Like most people these days, I don’t overthink things. I’ll go along with whatever. No firm beliefs, no hang-ups. Just a lack of self-confidence tangled up in fatalistic resignation. Whatever the situation, nothing ever reaches me on an emotional level. Nothing’s important. Because I won’t let it be. I operate on mood alone. No regrets, no looking back.

In the waking world, I obsess over the superficial. I devote myself to the acme of emptiness. And that devotion infiltrates my dreams, the world of my unconscious. Covered in thick plastic – that’s how I’ve made myself. Over years and years. The sadistic act of self-creation.

Hang on. That doesn’t seem right. I’m pretty sure if I was locked up in a place like that for my whole life and never allowed to leave, I’d end up apathetic too.

The lounge of the private terminal in Delhi. A place of beige leather sofas and cappuccinos, set deep in that world where a seeling modernity has yet to close over the land, and where in the empty spaces that lie between the elevated roads and the coloured glass buildings there are still, like insects taking shelter under the veined roof of a leaf, the encampments of families who built them. Black pigs still thread their way through the weeds, there are still patient lorry-loads of labourers, waiting among the dazzle of the new cars, for the lights to change. One India, dwarfed and stunted, adheres like a watchful undergrowth to another India which, in very physical ways, as with the roads that fly up out of the pale land, or the chunks of monorail that rise up from the ground like the remnants of an ancient wall, or the blank closed faces of the glass buildings, wishes to shrug off its poorer opposite: to leave it behind; to shut it out; to soar over it. One man, above all, captures the mood of this time: the security guard. In him, this man of expectation – a man not rich himself, but standing guard at the doorway to a world of riches – it is possible to feel the boredom and restlessness of a world that inspires ambition, but cannot answer it. Skanda watches him watching the lounge, with eyes glazed and yellowing from undernourishment. A favourite phrase from college returns: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I've tried reading the Bible. I never make it past all the talk about the firmament. The firmament is the thing, on Day 1 or 2, that divides the waters from the waters. Here you have the firmament. Next to the firmament, the waters. Stay with the waters long enough, presumably you hit another stretch of firmament. I can't say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark.

Escape procedures, however, were in full force. Some people, in a frenzy of antipathy and boredom, were drinking themselves into extreme approximations of longing to be together. Exchanging phone numbers, demanding to have lunch, proposing to share an apartment—the escalations of fellowship had the air of a terminal auction, a fierce adult version of slapjack, a bill-payer loan from a finance company, an attempt to buy with one grand convivial debt, to be paid in future, an exit from each other’s company at that instant.

INSUFFICIENT VEGETABLE OIL,’ quoth the replicator.

I rolled my eyes. We were similar, that’s all it ever was. Two years ago I’d been happy about it. Not only did we have the same sign and the same blood type, but we were even the same height and weight. Now I’m an inch taller, though.

The kind of men you see in the movies would be hard to handle in real life, though – they’re so fixated on their own masculinity. And sometimes that male pride, that proper behaviour, it all starts to seem ridiculous. If they could just get over themselves, then everything might be a whole lot simpler.

And my diet is horrific. I suppose I hate fresh fruit and veg because my mum was always telling me to get my five-a-day in. She’d always be saying, ‘It’s good for your looks. Ugly girls need all the help they can get!’ So, three pieces of stale cake it is – straight in my gob.

I can’t say for sure: at the first mention of the firmament, I start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. I grow restless. I flick ahead. It appears to go like this: firmament, superlong middle part, Jesus. You could spend half your life reading about the barren wives and the kindled wraths and all the rest of it before you got to the do-unto-others part, which as I understand it is the high-water mark.

The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo. Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract “failure.